How strange the concept of "The American Dream" must have seemed to the native peoples of this continent for all these decades. "The American Dream" - Native American culture, after all, is an entire system of existence created by the original American dreamers. They undertook journeys of challenge and hardship in a quest for dreams of the highest quality. They made special webs in which to snare bad dreams. They valued what their dreams told them, and applied dream information to guide their actions and direct their fate. The result was personal independence and spiritual prosperity.
How different life might be today if that original "American Dream" had become the one that we now share. In some ways life would certainly be better, and in other ways not. But no doubt, life would be different.
New rules were introduced, however, when global travelers showed up on North American shores. These rules, through the sheer number of their adherents, quickly became "THE" rules, and generated what has become the dominant "American Dream" version. With only one choice to make, Native American people made their bargain with destiny in a thousand different ways, but the single theme was always the same: "Accept your fate, and you will be left alone."
Now it is 1995, and what has been codified as "Indian Gaming" is thriving. It's such a great concept, too, capitalizing on a special status of limited sovereignty to satisfy an un-met market demand. In the process it is creating the "new dream" version of independence and freedom for tribal communities.
The rules, of course, are grinding and mutating along in their predictable way. The rules have no problem at all, for example, giving tax exempt status to an entity that has little or nothing to tax. If your ear is to the ground these days, you are hearing the sounds of governing authorities everywhere adjusting their collective heredity to this phenomenon.
The message now to the rule-makers should be this: Leave the money alone. It is theirs, not yours. They earned it the old fashioned way -by playing by the rules.
Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota, arguably the most universally recognized spiritual leader of a most spiritual people, said it 118 years ago. Maybe it's time to listen:
"We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace, and to be left alone."